Some see XML as a new technology and books on how to use this
new language regularly appear. In reality, it is not a new
language, but one of those ten-year-old technologies that reappears
on the scene as fresh and new. For an authoritative reference on
this flexible language and its possibilities, you cannot get better
credentials than Charles Goldfarb and Paul Prescod. Goldfarb is the
inventor of the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML).
Prescod was a member of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) that
created the XML subset of the SGML standard. Besides the expertise
of these two people, the book brings together the experience,
projects and products of 27 national and multinational
corporations. The included CD-ROM contains a warehouse of trial and
free software programs and related XML information.

The handbook is divided into 13 parts and 66 chapters. These
13 parts can be further organized into two groups, tutorials and
sponsored chapters. Part 1, Part XI and Part XII are XML tutorials.
Industry experts from 27 corporations contributed chapters to the
book, which are contained in parts II through X and organized by
areas of interest. These chapters are clearly marked as
sponsor-supplied. Part XIII is a guide to the CD-ROM and other
XML-related books. There are too many chapters to list in this
article. To see the table of contents, visit
http://www.phptr.com/ and
search for the book title. The search will produce a web page
containing the book's table of contents, a sample chapter, and a
list of the corporate sponsors.

I found two paths through the book. The authors recommend
reading Part I before going down either path. One path skips over
the sponsor chapters and follows the tutorials. The other path
wanders around, and within, the sponsor chapters. The tutorial path
seems to support the more technical reader who is interested in
learning to read and write proper XML documents. The sponsors' path
seems to support the more business-oriented person who is
interested it finding ways to enhance, automate, or webify their
business processes.

The tutorials present the XML Language Version 1.0 and
describe how to read/use XML-related specifications. The tutorials
in Part I walk you through a high-level overview of XML's
beginnings, the problem XML solves and major business areas
benefitting from XML, as well as terms, definitions and the use and
misuse of XML jargon. Part I tutorials are a prerequisite for the
tutorials in Part XI, which focus on creating document-type
definitions, creating XML documents, combining and sharing text
between documents, formatting and validating a document's
structure. One can easily jump from the tutorials of Part I to the
tutorials of Part XI without hindering the book's overall flow or
the reader's learning/exploration experience. For those with a
thirst to know more XML details, there is Part XII, which
demonstrates how to read seven XML-related specifications of the
W3C. These tutorials require a thorough understanding of the
material in Part XI and may be read in any order.

The sponsored chapters in Parts II through X cover several
areas of interest by presenting a collection of application, tool
and case study discussions. These discussions are grouped by:
middle-tier servers, e-commerce, portals, publishing, content
management, content acquisition, style sheets, navigation, and XML
and Programming. This part of the book is not hands-on. It is more
of a here is where XML has been used and what it has accomplished.
Application discussions lean more toward the conceptual end of the
spectrum. They offer high-level ideas about where XML has been (or
may be) used to solve business problems. Most of these discussions
include a conceptual or architectural representation of the
application being discussed. Tool discussions vary greatly between
the various authors. Nevertheless, each author concentrates on what
their tool can do with XML, rather than how to use the tool. As one
might expect, case studies are a bit more concrete since they tend
to examine real-world examples of what was set up. Often, they
include snippets of XML used to create the page or function being
presented.

The book concludes with a synopsis of free programs contained
on the CD-ROM and in other XML-related books. The accompanying
CD-ROM contains a virtual warehouse of trial and free software,
white papers, specifications, markup and code samples, demos and
sponsor product information. The 125 XML-centric software programs
are not crippled, or time-limited, and are presented as free-use
programs. Each of the 27 corporations is represented on the CD-ROM:
some with just a link to their web site; others provide demos or
information about their projects and products. Most of the CD-ROM
product demonstrations require a Windows platform to perform
properly. In some cases, there is “free” software for both
Windows and Linux/UNIX platforms. Some free software includes
source code. Links to a set of important XML web sites are also
provided on the CD-ROM.

After I owned this book for a while, I begin to reread it
from its index. I found the index to be robust, and it seems to
contain an adequately detailed listing.

After reading this book, you will not have any programs or
reusable code snippets. What you will have is knowledge of XML, a
collection of XML tools and tool sources and a reliable XML Version
1.0 reference.

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